the last book I read

The Hunted by Gabriel Bergmoser.

G'day, mate. Welcome to Australia. Land of Fosters, Castlemaine XXX, kangaroos, Shane Warne and all sorts of bonzer fair dinkum stuff. So come and visit! Although there's always a few less appealing things, like the crocodiles, but also a few people whose welcoming matey Aussieness has curdled in the sun and the solitude, like a pair of yellow crusty sweat-soaked underpants, into something altogether less pleasant.

Speaking of solitude, here's Frank, a man of slightly shady and dubious past including many things he'd rather forget, running a remote petrol station and shop on a remote rural highway. It's not the middle of nowhere, but you can definitely see it from there. Rather unexpectedly, Frank is currently accommodating a guest, his grand-daughter Allie, delivered to him for a brief stay while her parents work through some marital issues. 

Allie is a typically surly and uncommunicative teenager, not especially impressed at being dumped out in the sticks where nothing ever happens. Well, careful what you wish for, as things are about to Kick Off in a big way.

First, random couple Charlie and Delilah show up, needing fuel but also slightly lost and slightly grumpy with each other. They are followed onto the forecourt shortly after by a second car which swerves wildly to a halt, and from which emerges a female figure festooned in mud and gore who promptly collapses onto the tarmac.

Frank, Delilah and Charlie take the new arrival back to the house and Charlie - who turns out, handily, to be a nurse - stitches up the several nasty gashes she has in her leg while she is unconscious on the sofa. Meanwhile Allie minds the front desk and the till, and is soon visited by a shady-looking bloke who's very interested in whether she's seen a young woman recently, probably driving a car, maybe a bit dishevelled-looking. Erm, awkward.

Probably time for a bit of a flashback into a prior timeline to find out who this young woman is and what she's been up to, right? You betcha. But first we have to meet Simon, a city boy out on a road trip to find the "real" Australia in some ill-defined way. Perhaps this slightly mysterious girl he meets in a bar will help him? Or maybe she will just agree to sleep with him; that would be good too. Simon and the girl, whose name turns out to be Maggie, head off down the highway together with no particular destination in mind until, at Maggie's suggestion, they turn off the main highway down a rutted track. I mean, what's the worst that could happen, right?

Well, what happens in the short term is that they meet up with some young blokes seemingly out hunting and, after some initial tension, are invited back to their village to throw a few prawns on the barbie and blow the froth of a bit of the amber nectar. They are even offered some rustic but acceptable accommodation for the night. All nice and friendly and relaxed, and maybe Simon's detection of a bit of an edge beneath the rugged blokey banter is just him being a nervous city boy uncomfortable with this sort of thing? Maggie seems to be enjoying herself anyway. Or is she?

Spooked by some of his encounters with the locals and suspicious of Maggie's motives, Simon decides to escape the following morning in the car, but doesn't get very far before he is dragged from the car, given a beating and then offered a choice, be killed on the spot or provide a bit of sport by trying to escape into the bush and be hunted down. 

Maggie, meanwhile, is doing a bit of snooping around and comes upon a shed in which various meat is hanging from hooks in various states of ripeness. but WAIT A MINUTE these are actually people, presumably the remnants of people who have stumbled upon the village in a similar way in the past. While still reeling from this discovery Maggie is surprised by one of the villagers, but he is even more surprised when she stabs him in the throat with a meat hook and escapes. There is still the little matter of getting out of the village, though, something Simon was unable to do. Simon, however, is, or rather was, a soft namby-pamby city boy and Maggie, it turns out, has been hardened by a series of abusive childhood experiences into a one-woman killing machine just waiting for an opportunity to be unleashed. And this is that opportunity, right here. 

So Maggie slips away, under cover of darkness, and, inconvenienced only slightly by stumbling into a man-trap and having her leg lacerated, finds a car and makes good her escape, with only a couple of brutal killings required on the way. Her subsequent wild flight back across the scrub leads her to the road and the forecourt of Frank's garage. 

So now we're back where we came in and Reg, the guy who turned up asking after Maggie, smells a fairly obvious rat and finds his way over to the house, whereupon he finds Maggie, and shortly afterwards finds the contents of both barrels of a shotgun heading for his head. But he's got friends, including the various characters that Simon and Maggie have already met, and soon they turn up with revenge on their minds and only a few people standing in their way: Frank, Allie, Maggie, Charlie and Delilah, and Greg, a random guy in a suit who just happened to turn up on the forecourt at the wrong moment and would really just like to exit the whole situation, none of his business, no questions asked, thanks very much.

After a tense stand-off at the garage attention turns to the house, and Maggie and Allie are besieged while Charlie, Delilah and Greg are taken as hostages by the gang. That just leaves Frank, who just happens - like Maggie, legacy of a troubled past - to be something of a merciless killing machine himself, which is quite handy. The siege continues, various hostages are offed in messy ways, Frank makes it back to the house to help out the girls, and eventually it falls to Maggie to bring things to an end, with a bit of help from Allie, new to the whole merciless slaughtering game but showing a promising aptitude for it.

As gripping as The Hunted is, and it certainly is, the first thing you find yourself doing is ticking off things that resemble other works in a similar genre. For one thing, the whole premise broadly resembles the plot of the 2005 film Wolf Creek. Some more specific things: the Greg character in his role as Weaselly Corporate Guy resembles both Ellis from Die Hard and Craig Toomy from The Langoliers, and the business right at the end where Maggie rips off someone else's face and wears it to effect an escape is straight out of Silence Of The Lambs. And you can't really have human torsos on meat-hooks without it being reminiscent of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Then you move onto the plot contrivances that seem a bit clunky and awkward: Allie's parents' somewhat quixotic decision to house her with Frank, someone they haven't seen for years (haven't they got any mates?), the whole back-story with Maggie's mother which doesn't really add anything, and the thing with the two periods of siege where the villagers conveniently give the besieged people many minutes thinking time before steaming in and setting fire to things. 

So it's certainly not perfect, and does sort of give the impression of being bolted together from some bits of other classics of the genre with some perfunctory plot grouting in between, but it does its brutal business very effectively and in only a relatively slim 266 pages. 

the last book I read

Rabbit Redux by John Updike.

Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is in his mid-thirties, living with his wife, Janice, and their teenage son, Nelson, in a (fictional) city in Pennsylvania. He works a fairly dead-end job (alongside his father) as a linotype operator at a local printing firm, a job which is under threat of becoming redundant as a result of advances in computerised typesetting. 

Harry and Janice have a chequered history together: married quite young, and parents of both Nelson and a younger daughter, Becky, who Janice drunkenly drowned in the bathtub while Harry had briefly left the family home to shack up with a prostitute. But age has calmed things down a bit, or at least it has on Harry's side. Janice, on the other hand, feeling neglected and restless, begins an affair with local man Charlie Stavros, exotically Greek to Harry's corn-fed American, and an anti-war Democrat to Harry's hawkish Republican. Plenty to chew on there, as we're at the cusp of the 1960s turning into the 1970s and the Vietnam war is in full swing.

Keen to exercise his freedom now that Janice has swanned off with another man, Harry starts hanging out at a local jazz club and soon acquires a couple of lodgers: Jill, a young white girl from Connecticut and Skeeter, an eccentric black Vietnam vet with some radical political views and a mild Messiah complex. Harry is conscious that Jill is young enough to be his daughter, and moreover intermittently addled by the increasingly hard drugs Skeeter is plying her with, but when a bunk-up is offered is nonetheless unable to resist the urge to go WAHEYYY and climb on with some gusto. 

The loose commune at Harry's house is the focus of some local scandal, especially given Skeeter's increasingly eccentric behaviour and Jill's increasing detachment from reality and dependence on harder drugs, including, eventually, heroin. Harry seeks some solace by hooking up with the woman next door, Peggy Fosnacht, who despite being considerably older and plumper than Jill is a much more rewarding lay. It is while over at Peggy's in a post-coital slumber that Harry gets a call from Skeeter alluding vaguely to Bad Stuff happening at the house, and when Harry gets there he finds it on fire and with the fire service in attendance. Once they eventually get the fire under control they do a sweep of the house and bring out Jill's body - Skeeter had made good his escape but she was too deep in smack-induced slumber to wake up. 

So with his house destroyed and his erstwhile sort-of-girlfriend dead, and, moreover, with the axe finally falling on his job at the printing firm, Harry finds himself (and Nelson) back living with his parents again. As it happens Janice is starting to cool off on the whole Charlie Stavros thing and the end of the book finds Harry and Janice testing out a tentative reconciliation.

Rabbit Redux is the second book in the Rabbit series (which comprises four novels and a concluding short story) and a sequel to Rabbit, Run which I read probably thirty years ago. My recollections of that book are fairly hazy but I seem to recall having slightly mixed feelings about it, partly because of the unlikeability (if that is even a word) of the central character. Oddly, despite my being much closer to Rabbit's fictional age (mid-twenties) then than I am now I enjoyed Rabbit Redux considerably more, perhaps because my advancing age means I identify more closely with Rabbit's character traits (general grumpiness, irascibility with young people, persistent horniness). Marry Me is the only other Updike on this list, way back in 2009. 

As often happens, what it's actually about is a little more difficult to pin down. The idea of producing one of these novels every decade or so is presumably to produce a sort of audit of the current state of the USA through the eyes of a fairly ordinary everyman character (Rabbit has no pretensions to intellectualism); in the case of Rabbit Redux this means late-1960s topics like Vietnam and sexual politics. Much of the sex stuff was probably bracingly frank at the time, but has lost the power to shock fifty-odd years later. 

One odd parallel with a recent book on this list: Light Perpetual also featured a character whose job involved manual typesetting and who found themselves having to rethink their whole career after automation meant their former job no longer existed.